2025
The Books - 2025
Goodbye to Budapest - 11-15 - 01/24 - B - Mom Rec
Rouge - 02/24 - 03/07 - A - Sofia Rec
The Maidens - 03/08 - 03/11 - B
Open Throat - 03/14 - 03/15 - A - Buddy Read w/ CJ
Good Girls Guide to Murder - 03/11 - 03/23 - A
Red Dragon (Abridged) - 03/23 - 03/31 - A
Look at the Lights My Love - 02/01 - 02/03 - A
One Perfect Couple - 03/14 - 04/23 - B
Carry On - 04/17 - 04/23 - A (mostly) + B - Re-read
Bewilderment - 05/01 - 05/21 - A - Buddy Read w/ Yaling
Elegance of Hedgehog - 05/21 - 06/02 - A - Re-read
Rogue - 06/04 - 06-07 - A
The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue - 05/20 - 06/15 - A - Re-read
The Gentleman’s Guide to Getting Lucky - 06/15 - 06/16 - A
Lolita - 01/11 - 07/16 - B
Bag of Bones - 06/27 - 07/29 - A - Buddy Read w/ Yaling
Trust - 06/15 - 08/06 - A (mostly) + B - Buddy Read w/ Mom, Rec of Ella + Ella’s family
Big Sur - 06/11 - 08/14 - A
Small Game - 08/14 - 08/18 - A
Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine - 07/13 - 08/22 - B
If We Were Villains - 09/01 - 09/23 - A
Anthropocene Reviewed - 09/10 - 09/19 - A
Graveyard Shift - 09/21 - 09/30 - A
Into the Wild - 09/18 - 10/09 - A
Emperor of Gladness - 10/19 - 11/03 - A
Everything is Tuberculosis - 11/18 - 11/24 - A
Fangirl - 11/20 - 11/27 - A
There is No Ethan - 12/6 - 12/13 - A
Scam Goddess - 12/17 - 12/19 - A
Into Thin Air - 12/20 - 12/29 - A
Started and abandoned this year (read first few chapters)
Demon Copperhead
Outside the Dog Museum
World of the Wing
Don’t Let the Forest In
Secret Life of Trees
Curse of Marquis de Sade
Il Piccolo Principe
The Thoughts - 2025
Goodbye to Budapest - 11-15 - 01/24 B
It made me cry a lot
Modern people, modern Americans seem cowardly in comparison. We could never be that because we are too individualistic and protected from the horrors of our state
I didn’t expect so many characters to die but I think that is more realistic
Really hard to read but really good
Protests of common people in the past are respected in historical context but often not in the moment. It was a hard read with the terrible political situation of the USA.
Realistic for historical fiction which isn’t always the case, only gritty historical fiction I’ve read recently and will read more
Rouge - 02/24 - 03/07 - A
About intergenerational trauma & trauma generally
Interconnected & complex
A bit longer than it needed to be but the final escape scene and conclusion were good, interesting and bizarre and real to me
Mommy issues but not unrealistically cruel, just complicated which is how it usually is
The Maidens - 03/08 - 03/11 - B
I loved the vivid depiction of Cambridge and the clear love put into that landscape and the connection with Greek mythology
My expectations were too high because I loved his first book the Silent Patient so much
Decent and entertaining but twist wasn't as well done as in his first book
I liked the character of Fosca and the idea of the Maidens but it was a kind of a poor imitation of the Secret History
Overall good, easy to read and devour quickly (mainly since it was due at library so I read it in 3 days)
SPOILER - Zoe was not a very believable character, nor was Mariana inserting herself into the life like that, why Zoe chose to kill then after Sebastian's death was also confusing
Open Throat - 03/14 - 03/15 - A
Bizarre, thought provoking I suppose
Very short
Didn't do much for me as it could have
I still think about it months later though
Good Girls Guide to Murder - 03/11 - 03/23 - A
I had to get over the YA cringe, the cringe language and plot points
I ended up really liking it, complex thriller, good stakes, liked Pippa and Ravi together a lot but found Pippa's characterization too 'adorkable'
Liked conclusion a lot
Red Dragon (Abridged) - 03/23 - 03/31 - A
Didn’t realize it was abridged when I listened which makes sense as I felt I was losing plot
Why is Hannibal a yassified gay in the audiobook?
Decent but unremarkable, interesting structure compared to modern thrillers
Look at the Lights My Love - 02/01 - 02/03 - A
Short audiobook, I felt I didn't really get it or the point, especially as I don't like superstores, interesting portrait of France as so similar to everywhere else, maybe there was a point about the significance of superstores and peri-urban spaces but it was lost on me
One Perfect Couple - 03/14 - 04/23 - B
Really good, I liked the diary entries and the growing unease and everything, good pacing
Carry On - 04/17 - 04/23 - A (mostly) + B - Re-read
So good every time I'm obsessed
I love rereading it, it brings me such comfort and peace and joy
Bewilderment - 05/01 - 05/21 - A - Book Read w/ Yaling
I had so many thoughts about this and I did not like it but I respected what it was trying to do. I respect Richard Powers. I read this with Yaling so I took lots of notes for our virtual chats about it.
It was depressing since obviously this man’s wife has died and his child is not well-adjusted but I kept wanting to scream at him ‘Get your son in proper physiological care!’
We were in the son’s very negative mindset which was hard to handle. We have destroyed everything. We had the most marvelous planet ever in every way and we’ve destroyed it and not appreciated it. The privilege of life itself is squandered.
I think maybe the point is that it’s remarkable we existed at all? We only get this one tiny moment and it’s such a shame this is the moment we have. I’m grateful for the lack of interpersonal violence in my own life but we live in fascism and destruction that the individual feels powerless to stop and feels they must be complicit in to live.
I hated hated hated the ending. SPOILER - the kid just dies of hypothermia in a creek and it comes out of nowhere
Also the dad is an astrobiologist which is cool and interesting but also space exploration gets more funding than climate solutions which I fundamentally disagree with.
It’s nice to see the world through a child’s eyes. And yes, the world is cooler than science fiction. Plants eating light are wild!
Pacing often felt off. The first half was very slow and nothing happened. The second half went in confusing directions.
I think it’s about trying to hold on after grief, how someone could slip away and how through neural imaging we can keep them. But should we?
What is the purpose of education when the world is ending?
It was inspiring to see how much attention the father paid to his son’s feelings and changes. My parents weren’t perceptive like that.
Bewilderment is such a beautiful perfect title for the complexity and how little we know of the world
Reading this novel made me realize that I expect a more typical novel format, meaning disaster, plot, rising and falling action. This one was slow and atmospheric and nothing much happened. There was no urgency.
I don’t like the perfect dead wife trope, Bag of Bones which I read shortly after this had that as well
Is mental illness and despair the price we pay for being passionate and working toward climate solutions in a broken and uncaring world?
Elegance of Hedgehog - 05/21 - 06/02 - A - Re-read
Still holds up after 6 or 7 years
Cherry plum test
Journal of the movement of the world
In moving we are not fully present
I really love Renee, she’s really melodramatic and funny
She and Paloma are realistic in a way I can’t describe properly, their thought patterns and perceptions of the world around them are flawed in a very real and sympathetic way
I don’t agree with everything but it’s all thought provoking, for example the idea of having no culture making the youth burn cars
Paloma’s lack of empathy, she’s observant but judges Colombe’s issues with contamination and her mom taking antidepressants
The trauma of poverty in Renee’s youth
The camellias helping the drug addicted son get clean - the little things in life
The slow pace, the methodical analysis of things, the small things that give our lives meaning, the writing, everything is slow and meticulous, you are there with them
Certain lines are so lovely that they make me stop reading
Very respectful to sensations, taking the day to day sensations of life seriously
The belief that you can find someone with such a congruence of taste but in order to do that you need to be open about who you are, you need to be known and believe in your own worth and desirability
Also so funny at so many surprising moments
I forgot the end until the end - I wish it didn’t end that way!
The ethos is the purpose of life is small beauties and connection
Rogue - 06/04 - 06-07 - A
Holy hell this was so terrible but why did I eat it up! The first chapter was so good. Their meeting in the gas station? Amazing
Very bad though the writing was so bad, the plot, the pacing, the Twitch streamer assassins
But also omg so unhinged I was too invested why was I so invested
Hypothetically changed my life unfortunately now I want to be Onley James
The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue - 05/20 - 06/15 - A - Re-read
It’s so perfect every time I love it so much
‘It took several thousand miles to start to unlearn what his father taught him and to learn his is better than the worst things he’s done’
The Gentleman’s Guide to Getting Lucky - 06/15 - 06/16 - A
They have so much emotional maturity for 18 year olds
Felicity is so competent at 16 while I feel I’m floundering at 23
So funny omg
And also hard to read with Monty’s insecurity and big emotions and the sexual miscommunications
I want to hug him and it’s painful to read him trying to heal and his pain
I love Scipio
It makes me so emotional to read it now, to think of me reading it at 18 and being someone who was really trying and struggling and thinking of me now trying to find love and trying to be more than the pains of my past
Richard Peele is a canonical dice cheater
Lolita - 01/11 - 07/16 - B
Amazingly vivid prose and writing style, such a fantastic book in so many ways
Took me a long time because it was dense and uncomfortable
Such a great novel, anyone who views it as a love story must not be reading it with even half a brain cell, Dolores’ reality peaks through in such vibrant heart breaking moments
Has stuck with me and become a larger interest of mine, Nabokov’s legacy, the further interpretations, the concept in popular culture, it’s so divorced from the actual text which makes Humbert Humbert a clearly unreliable narrator and a clearly predatory and destructive man
Bag of Bones - 06/27 - 07/29 - A - Buddy Read w/ Yaling
Just ok, I was unimpressed compared to the other King I’ve read (Misery)
I was fundamentally uninterested in the romance plot and found the age gap sleazy
I really liked the theme of cyclical violence and violence as a key tenant on which the town was built. The real curse was trauma
The tension between the year-rounders and the summer house people
Complex depiction of grief
I think Max Devore and Rogette were interesting villains
Felt too long and I had to chug through the end which isn’t a good sign
SPOILER - I still had so many questions at the end. Why would Rogette want to kill Kyra? Did Jo realize the town’s complicity in Sara Tidwell and Kito’s deaths? Why did Bill Dean’s dad kill Klara, his daughter? Is the whole point that Sara Tidwell possessed people to kill their children with K names? Did I even fundamentally understand the plot?
Trust - 06/15 - 08/06 - A (mostly) + B - Buddy Read w/ Mom, Rec from Ella + Ella’s family
Expectations too high because Ella’s mom said it was the best book she’d read in her life and it won the Pulitzer
But it was really good, thought provoking, very specific to the times it writes about
Concept of playing the part of who you should be, Rask doesn’t know himself at all
Wealth as a barrier between yourself and the world
Helen is socially and intellectually elevated by her solitude but it also isolates her from the world
Playing an active role in the victories but not culpable for any defeats
Self-mythology, unreliable narrators
Overall good, well-written, interesting, twists were twisty, thought-provoking
SPOILER - I was so pissed at Helen’s unnecessarily cruel and depressing death
Big Sur - 06/11 - 08/14 - A
I don’t think I liked it overall, I liked the first part and the second but not the last. I finished because of sunk cost fallacy
I think he says pointed and relatable things, he is similar to all of us but there’s so much about it I can’t relate to (thank god)
Nostalgia for friends and era I never had, fluid socialization
Good conversations and spontaneity
As he descended into alcoholism and became less lucid, I liked it less and less since it was a lot of paranoia and hallucination, the end was nonsensical which wasn’t enjoyable to read
Made me really want to go back to Big Sur, I fear I didn’t appreciate it enough when I first went there
Small Game - 08/14 - 08/18 - A
Easy to read, interesting, good
Survival school for tech people was interesting touch
Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine - 07/13 - 08/22 - B
Liked it a lot, hopeful, sad, funny, honest
The joy of a friend, you really only need one
Nice depiction of a man and woman as platonic friends, nothing romantic
I loved Eleanor’s interactions with people who were better socially adjusted, they were so funny but also sad and poignant
If We Were Villains - 09/01 - 09/23 - A
Loved it so much
Loved the Shakespeare, the characters, the setting, I loved the cadence of the character’s conversations
I rushed my listening a bit as it was due from the library
SPOILER - I didn’t like that Meredith and Oliver wound up together nor did I like that James died but both made sense as a plot points but they weren’t writing choices that I loved
Anthropocene Reviewed - 09/10 - 09/19 - A
The unexpected favorite of this year, a book I know will mean a lot to me for years to come
Connected with me on such a surprisingly deep level, was an emotional rollercoaster, read by the author so I felt so connected to him and to it
“Pay attention to what you pay attention to” I’ve taken this concept with me in a meaningful way
The end of the introduction - it’s taken him up until this point to fall in love with life, when you feel emotions, when you have the physical manifestations of them, you can want to deflect and turn away from emotion but you can’t do that, “I want to look away from feeling, I want to deflect with irony or anything that will keep me from feeling directly”, very powerful introduction
The concept of feeling faint because of beauty of world
“We all know how loving ends (in death) . I want to fall in love with the world. I want to feel what there is to feel while I am still here.”
There’s no such thing as alone - even if no human is around - You will never walk alone.
We are never far from wonders - child looking at leaf
“Aesthetic beauty is as much about how and whether you look, as what you see”
“The wonders do not cease. It is our attentiveness that is in short supply. Our ability and willingness to do the work that awe requires” - Humanity’s capacity for wonder
“There is no way to the past but the memories hold us together” - his memory from the academic decathlon
“The beauty of the world will be enough, no need to paint and photograph it” - Toni Morrison quote
The concept of knowing you are in the good old days, the happiest time period of your life while you’re already in it - I feel this often with friends and in nature
John’s own mental health struggles, his near suicidality and his recovery
Kurt Vonnegut quote - create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured
Everything easy to mock is actually really interesting
“I’m in an us that doesn’t require a them” + “Traditions are a way of being with others, not just those you are with at the time but everyone whose ever observed them in the past” - from the Indy 500 chapter
You are every version of yourself you’ve ever been inside you currently
Either the universe decided I needed a break or maybe I just did something that would make me happy and it made me happy
This book affected me very deeply. I think it hit me at the exact right time, newly moved to Sweden, thinking about all of these big questions as usual but trying to center hope in my life
Graveyard Shift - 09/21 - 09/30 - A
Fine but short and generic
Felt undercooked and much worse than author’s first book
Into the Wild - 09/18 - 10/09 - A
Every outdoorsy, intense, or troubled young person thinks they understand Chris McCandless and I am no exception
I think about Chris a lot, I judge myself because I don’t live in my principles the way he does, he is a cautionary tale when I fantasize about woodland escape
I love Krakauer’s writing style and journalism
Emperor of Gladness - 10/19 - 11/03 - A
I liked it but not as much as Vuong’s other work and not as much as I expected to
‘He was 19, in the midnight of his childhood and a lifetime from first light’
Vuong seems to say that the purpose of this novel is hope but I do not feel it because it was negatively impacting my well being to read something so hopeless and dark, yes Hai connects with Grazina but there is a time limit and Hai isn’t healing during this time, he isn’t living in honesty or connection, the act of reading the novel depressed me regularly
Hai’s relationship with his mom is very real and impactful, I really like her character, she’s a real and non-moral entity and I loved the moment when he looks through the window at her life without him, her scented candles and dress, and realizes her fullness as a woman outside of just being his mother
I loved Sony’s character, I think he added so much to the story
SPOILER - How am I meant to interpret that ending? Did Hai kill himself? I found it so straightforwardly depressing and hopeless
Everything is Tuberculosis - 11/18 - 11/24 - A
Very good and interesting and important
Reignited my interest in global health
I don’t think I will do anything with this new knowledge though, besides bring it up in conversations
The crisis still feels far off and disconnected from my life
Fangirl - 11/20 - 11/27 - A
Light and mindless
Main character is kind of ‘not like other girls’ but that was realistic for that person and that time
I liked Levi as a love interest, he is realistic, not a perfect 10 with his receding hairline and penchant for cigarettes but his kindness and realism makes him more attractive, I liked the portrayal of a poor, non-modelesque farm guy as a worthy love interest
There is No Ethan - 12/6 - 12/13 - A
Interesting, psychological
Got really addicted to the story, finding out what happened and the manipulation and mystery of it but ending was kind of flat, i wanted more consequences but that’s not realistic
Surprised how interested I became
Not much payoff but didn’t fall flat at end
Scam Goddess - 12/17 - 12/19 - A
Fun, light, easy, she’s likable but so LA actor out of touch, nice to read a book about someone following their dreams and it working out but also so much of that is luck
Success is a self-defined concept
Anyone who is trying to minimize you is trying to maximize themself in some way
Life advice - We statements - ‘Can we fix this?’ not ‘can you fix this’, Instead of saying ‘ I don’t know how to do this’ say ‘You are so well versed could you give me tips?’, don’t say ‘sorry I’m late’ say ‘thank you for your patience’
It’s not embarrassing to want things unapologetically and go for them
Into Thin Air - 12/20 - 12/29 - A
So fascinating, disturbing, and impactful
It is all so deeply unnecessary, so voluntary, so dangerous. And yet, I understand the appeal, I really do, it’s hard to articulate
Everest is something you can’t stop thinking about once you start, it’s so universal, so human, so mythic, Nepal is such a far-off and fascinating place
Stats
Books - 30
Physical Books - 5
Audiobooks - 23
Both - 2
Longest Read (Days) - Lolita - 6 months
Shortest Read (Days) - Open Throat & Gentleman’s Guide to Getting Lucky - 2 days
Longest Read (Pages / Audiobook Hours) - Bag of Bones - 736 pages / 21.5 hours
Shortest Read (Pages / Audiobook Hours) - Look at the Lights, My Love - 128 pages / 2 hours
Buddy Reads - 4 - 2 w/ Yaling, 1 w/ CJ, 1 w/ Mom
Recommendation Reads - 3 - 1 from Sofia, 1 from Mom, 1 from Ella + Ella’s family
Average Time to Read a Book - around a month
2.5 books per month, one finished every 12 days! I feel great about that!
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